Tim Conneally

Just days before the October 11th deadline, the United Arab Emirates' Telecommunications Regulatory Authority today announced that Research in Motion's BlackBerry services are now compliant with local law and will not be blocked.

Research in Motion's BlackBerry services have stirred controversy in a number of countries due to the fact that they communicate only with offshore servers and do not allow any backdoor surveillance. In addition to the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, Lebanon, and India have all asked for RIM to alter the BlackBerry messaging structure to conform with local laws. A common complaint is that illegal activity could be discussed and planned securely on BlackBerry and local authorities would have no access to such communications.

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After almost two years in alpha, Mozilla today finally upgraded its mobile browser Fennec to beta 1 on Android and Maemo. With the upgrade to beta, it sheds the name "Fennec" altogether and grows into full-blown Firefox.

On Android, the .apk is still called Fennec and will replace the alpha installation and cute icon with a shiny new Firefox icon. In our initial runs through the beta, it does appear to be faster handling and less prone to crashing than the alpha build, but we haven't put it through its paces yet. No Earth-shattering changes so far, we'll updateif any turn up.

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Back in July, Microsoft opened the public beta of a new version of the WebMatrix Web development tool. Yesterday, the second beta of the software launched, and rolled in a few new shortcuts and tools in the software.

This new beta includes support for the new ASP.NET syntax called "Razor" for simplifying inline coding; it adds template projects for common usage scenarios, including a new Wishlist project; it integrates with open source package manager NuPack; and adds support for a NuPack toolkit that includes Helpers for Analytics, Facebook, GamerCard, Gravatar, LinkShare, Captcha, Twitter and Video scenarios.

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North America's 4G footprint is beginning to take shape. MetroPCS now has two LTE networks open in Las Vegas and in the Dallas/Ft. Worth metroplex, yesterday Verizon Wireless announced that it will have LTE in 38 U.S. cities and 60 commercial airports by the end of 2010. Also this week, AT&T announced its first LTE-capable device, and Canadian carrier Rogers announced its first 700MHz LTE trial in Ottawa, Ontario.

LightSquared, the still-in-development wholesale LTE network built in the 1-2GHz L-band, announced several important partnerships today for equipment, chips, and consumer devices as well.

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When the Walkman portable cassette player revolution had firmly gripped the world in the early 80's, Audio-Technica produced a unique product that capitalized on the portability trends, but applied it to vinyl records. It created tiny, clamshell-style record players that stripped away the big turntable in favor of one with a 3.5" diameter that could still play 12" LPs.

The most notable versions of this turntable were the AT-727 "Sound Burger," and the AT-770 "Mister Disc." And though these devices weren't commercial breakthroughs in their time, they now fetch significant sums on eBay, and have enjoyed a massive resurgence in consumer interest.

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As expected, Logitech today officially launched the first piece of Google TV hardware, the Logitech Revue set-top box. While a lot was already known about the product, today's announcements filled in all the gaps, and revealed some additional surprise features that were heretofore unknown.

In June 2010, Logitech first presented the Revue, showing off the box, its integration with the home theater as a Harmony-powered IR blaster, and its support for Android applications. But this didn't really tell consumers what kind of device it would be, such as an over-the-top streamer like Roku or Apple TV, or home media manager like WD TV or the Boxee Box. Later, it was shown off controlling a DVR and offering Google-powered searches, but still it looked like a device without an absolutely clear identity.

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As more people put more sensitive information on Facebook, it's becoming increasingly important to give users better ways to control who sees that data and how it's used. At a press conference in Palo Alto today, Mark Zuckerberg and company unveiled three big enhancements to the way users interact with their Facebook accounts, with the underlying theme of privacy.

First, users can now download everything they've ever posted on Facebook, including all correspondences between friends, all photos and video they've been tagged in, and their friends list as a single zipped file.

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Network hardware company Cisco today introduced umi telepresence, its first HD video conferencing product designed for consumer televisions.

Consumers now have access to the TelePresence technology humorously product-placed on NBC's 30 Rock last year; Cisco umi includes an HD camera and a broadband-connected console that users hook up to their television. Once the unit is connected, they can then make video calls to other umi users or Google video chat users, record video postcards for Facebook and YouTube, or manage contact lists and profiles via remote control. When users receive a video call or message when they're away from their TV, they can receive text message alerts that a video message awaits them. Video messages can be checked on remote PCs as well as on the console.

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With such a large catalog of software and solutions, it's often a task remembering the names of Microsoft's products, especially when they are prone to changing as new versions come out. Unreleased products and betas are a whole other affair altogether.

Fortunately, Mary Jo Foley, Microsoft expert over at ZDNet and author of Microsoft 2.0: How Microsoft Plans to Stay Relevant in the Post-Gates Era, has released the latest Whitepaper that sorts out all of Microsoft's currently known project codenames called All About Microsoft: CodeTracker.

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At CTIA Enterprise and Applications 2010 in San Francisco today, mobile phone maker and major Android supporter Motorola unveiled six new Android smartphones that will be available at different points later this year. In typical Motorola fashion, each device offers a unique selling point to make it stand out in the Android marketplace.

Flipside
This QWERTY slider features a unique large trackpad on the front panel beside the 3.1" touchscreen. It runs a 720MHz processor and Android 2.1, and will be available for $99 on AT&T.

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Though AT&T hasn't launched its next generation HSPA+ or LTE networks yet, the carrier Tuesday introduced the first LaptopConnect devices that will support the technologies.

The first LTE-capable device will be the USBConnect Adrenaline from LG, and the first device supporting HSPA+ will be the USBConnect Shockwave from Sierra Wireless.

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Tuesday, popular instant messaging and VoIP chat client Skype officially launched its Skype application for devices running Android 2.1 and up. While Skype is one of the most popular VoIP clients, bringing it to the Android platform has been quite problematic. With this release, we see those problems have persisted.

What it does

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In the thin-and-light "ultraportable" class of notebooks, one of the first features to be removed as a space-saving measure is the optical drive. But these space limitations can be worked around with consolidated solutions like the so-called "Hybrid Drive" which combines an optical disk drive and SSD in a single drive enclosure.

Today, HLDS (the joint venture between Hitachi and LG) unveiled its second generation of hybrid drive, designed for use in smaller form factor devices such as ultraportable notebooks. It's an evolution of the HyDrive concept that HLDS showed off earlier this year, but with today's announcement, Micron is the supplier of the NAND flash components. The first run of these drives will come with 16GB, 32GB and 64GB of memory.

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October 11, one week from today, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and AT&T Mobility & Consumer Markets CEO Ralph de la Vega will host a press conference in New York City to launch Windows Phone 7.

While It has not been explicitly stated whether the event next week will be an event to unveil the Windows Phone 7 launch devices, or be a ceremony to reveal the final RTM version of the mobile operating system (which was launched to OEMs and developers In mid-September,) the participation of De la Vega suggests it will be the former. Furthermore, it was at this same time last year that Microsoft launched the Windows Phone brand, so the timing of this event also falls in line with Microsoft's mobile development calendar.

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In advance of the expected launch of Google TV this week, Google on Monday opened up the official Google TV website, which provides the first in-depth look at the Web-on-TV platform since it was unveiled five months ago.

In addition to the deeper look at the Google TV search bar, Chrome Web browser, and Android-based application environment Google TV brings, the company announced a host of partners who have developed Google TV-optimized sites or Google TV apps.

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